An Orphan World
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
In a poverty-stricken neighbourhood wedged between the city and the sea, a father and son struggle to keep their heads above water. Rather than being discouraged by their difficulties and hardship, their response is to come up with increasingly bizarre and imaginative plans in order to get by. Even when a horrifying, macabre event rocks the neighborhood and the locals start to flee, father and son decide to stay put. What matters is staying together.This is a bold, poignant text that juxtaposes a very tender father-son relationship with the son's sexual liberation and a brutal depiction of homophobic violence. Giuseppe Caputo uses delicate – yet electrifying – lyricism and imagery to weave a tale that balances desire, violence, discrimination, love, eroticism and defiance, while evoking with surreal humor the social marginalization of the protagonists as they struggle to keep afloat in a society where there are no safety nets.Like a brightly-lit theme park with its house of horrors, reminiscent in parts of James Baldwin’s Another Country or Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex trilogy, An Orphan World defies the reader to look away, and the reward is an exhilarating carnival ride filled with beauty, compassion and loss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Colombian writer Caputo's transfixing debut explores the poverty, sexuality, and community found in a hardscrabble neighborhood. The nameless young adult narrator lives with his inventive, hopeful father in a threadbare apartment. While the father dreams up new ways to make money such as turning their home into a "Talking House" using a tape recording of his voice, or opening a late-night snack shop the narrator seduces strangers online and recounts his first experience at a gay bathhouse, continuously searching for physical connection and escape. After a homophobic massacre at a bar, many of the narrator's friends move away, but he and his father stay behind. Flashbacks flesh out the narrator's relationship with his father, as when, for instance, the father took inspiration from cave paintings to draw on the walls of their unfurnished, undecorated apartment. Each scene has a dreamlike quality, and the father and son's abject poverty comes through in careful detail, never slipping into the maudlin. As a late stretch of prosperity shows the protagonists in a new light, it's hard not to expect the other shoe to drop. Caputo's arresting novel hits hard.
